Behind the foreign secretary's assurances that this will not be a war without end is the admission that defeating the Taliban is not realistic – hence the drive for reconciliation. While political solutions are welcome, many questions remain unanswered. Why would the British and others expect deals with the Taliban and other insurgents to stick? Why would they expect such people, if given positions of power, to respect the rights of Afghans, particularly women?

The other big idea is "reintegration" – code for bags of gold. At best this buys a temporary space to build the government and security forces. At worst it backfires through bad intelligence, fuels corruption and creates grievances among Afghans who did not take up arms, and were not rewarded with gold. Engaging in lawlessness to address lawlessness seems perverse at best.

If fighting corruption and warlordism are (belatedly) on the international agenda, systemic and politically painful reforms are required. Government appointments need to be independently vetted and an impartial method of penalising corrupt officials has to be created.

The pledge by Hamid Karzai to rid his cabinet of mafia-like figures has to be implemented without exceptions – including through backdoor appointments as "advisers". The power of local warlords and commanders has to be challenged, including through prosecutions of the most abusive.

Foreign embassies and armies must also change the way they operate. By having security alliances and holding high level meetings with known criminals, and hiring the armed men of former warlords or drug traffickers to provide security or logistics, they expose themselves as hypocrites to Afghans taking risks to reform their country. This short-termist deal making must change.

The military strategy now rests on a gradual British handover to the rapidly expanding Afghan security forces. One insider calculates that the planned growth of the army, police, intelligence, private security and militia will create one armed man for every 32 civilians.

New police recruits get just a few weeks of paramilitary-style training. If there's no time to teach them the law the potential for serious human rights abuses is large. Unrealistic goals for building up the security forces are likely to fuel the lawlessness that everyone now accepts underlies much of the government's unpopularity and the growing insurgency.

If the British and others are not careful, ill-conceived deals and bribes to buy loyalty (usually temporary) of men opposed to women's rights and the rule of law could be the legacy of the west's "good war" in Afghanistan.